> I'm sure we can invent much better competitive games that are not that prone to these problems.
I rather doubt that. Go was thought to be much harder to solve, but AI has caught up there, and with techniques that will probably generalise to any similar games.
Well, if you want to replace Chess you'll need something that scratches the same itch, which will probably involve some level of similarity. It's hard to even define the terms of a question like "is cycling better than chess?" - maybe, but even if you have a compelling argument for why, you're unlikely to convince people to switch from one to another.
